IT IS ONLY BY THINKING of Walker Percy that I can begin to make sense of what has befallen the city by which I live, where my wife and our four children were born, and that I have come to call home. Percy, the celebrated author of six novels, lived in Covington, Louisiana, just north of Lake Pontchartrain, and set his stories in the orbit of New Orleans and its culture. He wrote of the confrontation of modernity and tradition, of the alienation of the individual, of redemption and apocalypse, of natural disaster and manmade plague. He died in 1990 and was buried with the monks of St. Joseph Abbey near his home.
Percy was a deeply Catholic author, but never alleged to have been a saint. To the Catholic mind, that means his soul was marked for purgatory before admittance to heaven, a place or time of penance or cleansing to prepare to see God. Catholics are bound to believe that purgatory exists, but the precise form of its labors, and the timetable for its completion, have been left to our imagination. Six novels in 30 years suggests an author who did not write quickly or easily, so let us suppose that Percy's purgatory was to write one last novel, a perfect novel about a perfect storm: a monster hurricane headed straight to New Orleans, diverted at the last moment ever so slightly east, weakened in force ever so marginally--no doubt by the prayers of the city's faithful to their Lady of Prompt Succor--but with full disaster doubling back nonetheless as a result of human incompetence, corruption, malice, and neglect. It is a classic Percean plot.
Now, Satan has no purchase on the souls in purgatory--they are destined for salvation--but maybe human error is still possible there, and if so, maybe Percy's novel, like Robert E. Lee's plans for the Battle of Antietam, fell into Satan's hands. Once an angel of light, he knew brilliance when he saw it, and immediately sent a message to God as he had done in the age of Job. "Let me put to the test these Americans," he wagered, "to see which of us they serve, you, as they never tire of professing, or me, as seems to much of the world more likely. Let me stir up the winds of the Atlantic, give them a taste of Florida to distract an unsuspecting nation, then send them right to the port that gathers the grain and coal and other fruits of the heartland, that refines my nectar, oil, and see whether your Americans will do my bidding." A colloquy followed. The Father nodded. And it was done.
II
"MUCH OF WHAT HAPPENED in New Orleans this week might have been avoided," Mark Fischetti wrote in the New York Times the Friday after Katrina struck. As a matter of civil engineering this is true, but as a matter of political reality, a serious catastrophe was bound to happen. That the sophisticated plan touted by Fischetti was called "Coast 2050" suggests that even those willing to prepare for the future barely expected to see the fruits of their efforts in their lifetimes. Of course all of that changed in 72 hours. New Orleanians are now scattered across America--both those who left of their own accord, and those sent away by bus after harrowing days in the Superdome or the Convention Center--but one can be sure that most of them will want to come home when they can. It's not a matter of reason; one lives for love in New Orleans, and to most New Orleanians that means for family and home. It's a sentiment that cuts across the many differences of class and race now made visible to the world like an open wound.
But rebuilding New Orleans is not just a dream of the romantic or a demand of those with nowhere else to go. As George Friedman argued in an article that circulated widely on the Internet in the days after the storm, it stands to reason as a matter of geopolitics that the United States needs to protect the port at the mouth of the major river that drains the continent. Not software for export nor much by way of consumer goods passes through the city, as they do the ports on the east and west coasts, but coal, grain, and other commodities come down the Mississippi on barges to be loaded for shipping abroad; steel arrives here for manufacturers in the United States; oil from the Gulf (ours and theirs) is refined and distributed; chemicals are produced along the river above the city, and much more. As Friedman wrote, from the time of the Louisiana Purchase "until last Sunday, New Orleans was, in many ways, the pivot of the American economy." It may not have been its growing point--indeed, part of the inertia in the city and in thinking about it came from the palpable sense that it represented the past rather than the future of American commerce--but New Orleans and the ports of Louisiana and Baton Rouge upriver together handle all the physical commodities still necessary to modern life. (When gasoline prices around the country jumped a dollar or more after the city went under, all America was reminded of that stubborn geographic fact.)
That protection of the city is possible if the political will is there can be seen both in the existing control of the river and in the example of the Dutch. As John McPhee described in his 1989 book The Control of Nature, flood-protection along the Mississippi River was once the responsibility of local communities, once even of individual plantations. These did their jobs with various degrees of effectiveness, but the more successful levees put added pressure on the others, for the force of gravity on water is inexorable: High water wants to flood and will find the weakest barrier. Eventually, the only viable solution was to centralize the levee system under the control of the Army Corps of Engineers. This was begun already in the late 19th century; indeed, William Graham Sumner complains of it as an example of illegitimate governmental interference in his 1883 classic, What Social Classes Owe to Each Other.
The Corps's ambition, according to McPhee, reached a sort of culmination in the building of the Old River dams and locks near the spot where the Red River empties into the Mississippi, designed to keep the great river in its present channel and out of the Atchafalaya basin, where it seems naturally to seek a shorter outlet to the Gulf, while allowing high water from the main river to be released into the basin if necessary to prevent flooding downstream. Though McPhee points to the potential for catastrophe should the dams ever fail, the levee system as a whole has tamed the lower Mississippi. The disastrous flood of 1927 in St. Bernard Parish downriver from New Orleans, memorably described in John Barry's Rising Tide, was caused by a deliberate breach in the levee south of New Orleans in order to relieve pressure on the levees through the city itself. (That is why, even today, when a levee is breached, those down water often assume it was deliberate.) The 1927 flood led to the building of the Bonnet Carré Spillway upriver from the city, permitting the Corps to divert high waters from the river into Lake Pontchartrain, something they have to do every decade or so. When the gates are opened, you can see the brown river water trickle into the lake from Interstate 10 west of the city. It seems so little at any moment, but last time aerial photos showed the whole lake turned brown in barely a week.
Except when the spillway is opened, Lake Pontchartrain is part of a water system that is separate from the river. Fed by slow-moving rivers of its own and by another, smaller lake to its west, Pontchartrain averages only 12 to 14 feet in depth, but is long and wide: 40 miles from east to west, 24 from north to south at its widest point. (The latter span is crossed by a causeway that connects Mandeville and Covington on the North Shore, the city's fastest growing and upscale suburbs, to Metairie, the suburb immediately to the city's west; despite its length, it has become a major commuting route.) On its eastern end, Pontchartrain opens to the Gulf of Mexico just a little way north of the mouth of the Mississippi, through the much smaller Lake Borgne. As the world now knows, not the river but the lake was the cause of the terrible flooding of New Orleans. The lake rose as the storm surged water in from the Gulf and added rains of its own, and it soon broke through a couple of levees, one on the Industrial Canal, which connects the lake and the river on the eastern side of the city, the other on the Seventeenth Street Canal on the city's western edge, into which water is pumped to drain the city into the lake.
Lake Pontchartrain is geologically very similar to the Zuider Zee in the Netherlands. Both are near the mouth of a major river draining the continent--in Holland, of course, it is the Rhine--and both are naturally fresh water or brackish. And once one does the conversions, even the dimensions are almost identical: four to five meters deep, a little shy of 100 kilometers in length, about 50 in width. Of course the natural history of the Zuider Zee is better known. Called Flevo Lake by the Romans, it was renamed in 1287, after a flood from the North Sea broke dikes and widened its mouth. Fifty thousand people are thought to have died in that flood; some 10,000 died in November 1421, when dikes broke again.
But the Zuider Zee has been tamed by human engineering. A 1918 act initiated the project after flooding two years before, and by 1932 a dam had been completed across its mouth. Some land behind the dam has been reclaimed in polders, some for dwelling, some for farming. What is essential is that the Zuider Zee has never flooded with waters from a North Sea storm since the project was completed, even in 1953, when a winter storm devastated Holland's then-unprotected south. The replacement of individual dikes with a uniform dam and sea wall, imagined since the 17th century, planned by Cornelis Lely as early as 1891, and finally built when he became the Dutch minister of transport and public works, effectively removed vulnerability from the Zuider Zee. A modern series of movable sea walls and dikes has since been built in the southern region, allowing continued tidal flow in fair weather but closable in foul. Modern engineering, with increasing sensitivity to the natural environment so far as is consistent with protecting human life, has restored to the "Low Countries" of Europe the kind of wealth they had known several hundred years before.
What the Dutch could do to the Zuider Zee almost a century ago, and with less disruption to their southern inlets within recent memory, Americans can surely do to the Pontchartrain today and to the other wetlands adjacent to New Orleans. To be sure, our summer hurricanes from the tropics are fiercer than their winter storms off the Arctic, but technology is comparably more advanced. The mouth of the Pontchartrain in Lake Borgne is no wider, indeed a little narrower, than that of the Zuider Zee. If the engineers think it advisable, a second dam might be built in the middle of the Pontchartrain as in the Zuider Zee; in fact, the causeway bridge already spans this route and is slated for expansion. Fully mastered, the water level in the lake could be lowered in hurricane season to compensate for the water that a hurricane would drop as rain and for the height of the waves it could stir. This would limit even the worst surge that could double back from the lake into New Orleans, prevent excessive pressure on the levees once the storm had passed--the cause of the flooding of most of the city--and even keep the city above the lake in case of a breach. And the North Shore, which is largely unleveed, would also be protected from storm surge flooding if the lake were managed, not left to nature's whim.
In short, just as control of the Mississippi took a sort of paradigm shift in thinking--from community levees protecting individual towns and plantations to a long, continuous system maintained by the Corps of Engineers--so the current pattern of individual levees protecting New Orleans and its neighbors from the lake and its canals, each with its own Levee Board staffed by patronage appointments, could be replaced by an integrated system that asserted control over the lake itself, and an analogous system to master the westbank wetlands as well, now also under several jurisdictions. It only requires a change of thinking and federal dollars--though if the estimates in the "Coast 2050" plan are correct, the cost barely exceeds the first emergency relief package passed by Congress in the aftermath of the Katrina flood and is dwarfed by the second. Not even counting the lives lost and the communities destroyed, it would be a bargain.
III
THE ZUIDER ZEE SYSTEM took under 15 years to complete once the Dutch got serious; the more modern system in Holland's south took 30. Even if the plan for New Orleans devised in 1998 had been immediately enacted it would not likely have been finished in time for Katrina, and in fact the scientific analysis of the possible flooding of New Orleans by 15 feet of water from the lake had only been worked out by scientists in the late 1990s and gradually brought to the public's attention in the last few years. The bitter partisan recrimination in the days since the flooding, mostly concerning the relief effort and its various delays, is indicative of the politics that made adoption of an imaginative solution to the threat of a hurricane impossible in recent years. Indeed, as many have rushed to say, the politics of the city and the state are a tangled knot, and when blame eventually gets apportioned, there will be plenty to pass around.
Out-of-state observers are inclined to think the need for massive rebuilding (as some wit noted, one dare not call it "reconstruction") offers planners a clean slate in much of the city, and they must be relieved that the Supreme Court decided the Kelo case as it did, in favor of the urban planners rather than the private owners. I'm inclined to the view that it will be mostly those who love the city who come back, and they will want to restore as well as rebuild. There will be room enough for both. Leaving to others the matter of sorting out the past, let me point to areas of possible consensus concerning the city's future, first among the locals, then in the nation at large.
Since the oil business pulled out of New Orleans for Houston, company by company over the past decade or so, the city has relied ever more on tourism as its major industry--a dead-end choice for a commercial city that, as Joel Kotkin recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal, "lies not in creating its future but selling its past." The city has given in to every weak impulse and temptation, as though they were the cause of its charm. Historically, conventions came to New Orleans as a place to do business, not just a place to play, and its fabled hospitality and charm depended upon a mingling of regular customers and visitors. The world-famous restaurants were gathering places for the well-to-do of the city, not just out-of-towners with expense accounts, and the culinary culture they represented was shared by every level of society, as tourists not on expense accounts discovered to their delight. A clear commitment to master the natural threat to the city ought to send serious commerce, business, and industry the signal they need to return, and this would bring repair of the cultural infrastructure as well as the physical. Moreover, once secure, there is no reason that New Orleans should not find a niche in the growing information economy, which values personality and thrives on human interest as well as technical proficiency. The large housing projects built in the city after World War II had become such shameful dens of misery and criminality that over the past several years some of them have been partially dismantled and others entirely razed. Rebuilding such boondoggles is not the kind of federal project New Orleans needs. But a great public work that at once protects the city, assures its future existence, and brings jobs in construction ought to be public money well spent.
Race is never far from the surface of New Orleans politics--perhaps it is the surface of New Orleans politics--but it operates in a way very different from its depiction in the national press. Blacks have controlled the city government for a generation, and in the election last year the last two whites elected and reelected citywide moved on. The current mayor, Ray Nagin, was no big-city boss but CEO of the local cable company, Cox Communications. He ran as a reformer with the support of the city's business community--"Nagin-Reagan" was the taunt in the campaign--and he is representative of a rising class of black professionals and businesspeople in the city. The ancient rivalry of New Orleans and Atlanta--once cast as the Old South versus the New--plays itself out now in black middle-class culture. One has only to drive area highways to see that two major annual events in New Orleans--the Bayou Classic football game between Southern University and Grambling State University over Thanksgiving weekend, and the Essence Festival over the Fourth of July--draw thousands of well-off black Americans back home to New Orleans, even though Atlanta has been more successful in creating modern white-collar jobs.
Except in some of the newer suburbs, but even there to some degree, blacks and whites of every social class encounter one another in New Orleans all the time. This is never more true than at Mardi Gras, when uptown families and the people you saw on TV at the Superdome stand along the same parade route and compare the beads they catch. There is still social separation of the races--different churches (though some mixing between Catholics and evangelicals) and different carnival krewes--but these coexist with physical proximity. The national press still misses this, wanting to tell a story about how white houses stayed dry and black houses flooded. But Lakeview, next to the notorious breach in the Seventeenth Street Canal, is largely white, and so is flooded St. Bernard Parish, while poorer black communities interspersed among the mansions of St. Charles Avenue, over by the river, are dry. It is characteristic of New Orleans that the usual generalizations about race unravel. Many distinctive New Orleanian traits--whether tolerance of corruption on the one hand, or staunch religious faith on the other--cut across racial lines.
No one from the area was surprised by the eruption of violence when the rising waters seemed out of control. Even a week or two later, hints of the extent of the street war are only beginning to trickle out. Those who stayed and have subsequently evacuated tell of the constant sound of gunfire during the moonless nights; others reported seeing armed gangs (though I know of no pictures of such in the major media), and stories of rapes and robberies in the super-shelters abound. It quickly became politically incorrect in national circles to express concern about the looting, as though all that was going on was a few desperate people taking what they needed to survive. When and if the full story of the breakdown of order is told, it will be a harrowing tale. What it means for the future of the city--how it will affect crime in an already violent place, how it will affect race relations--is something that only the future knows. One can imagine the criminal bands broken, and one can imagine them resentful and defiant. One cannot imagine the city indifferent about crime and security for a long, long time.
The eruption of partisan rancor almost immediately on the national scene is also not surprising to those observing the tenor of politics in recent years, but it is depressing nonetheless. Most Americans pull together in times of crisis and let go of partisan differences until the danger is past, but bipartisanship in the face of disaster did not seem to be the guiding spirit of the political classes in the first week. It didn't help that prominent northern Republican politicians dropped hints that the city might not be worth saving or rebuilding, as if resentful that the statue of General Lee still stands atop a column at the head of St. Charles Avenue looking serenely yet sternly at the business district and the French Quarter, as if the old sore never quite heals. As modern Republicans readily enough admit among themselves, the party does not always seem equipped ideologically to understand the value and the delicate order of a great city, which is more inegalitarian than the moralists among them wish to admit and more dependent on the character of the community than the libertarians are able to explain. As for the demagoguery of the "angry left," ignoring that both the city and the state are in Democratic hands, it is to my mind beneath contempt.
But the outreach of America to New Orleans and to the surrounding areas of Mississippi and Alabama also affected by the storm has been heartwarming, indeed overwhelming. For all the complaints about the first response, the rescue count by boat and helicopter the first few days now looks as though it will significantly exceed the death toll. Medical teams from around the country arrived with alacrity and worked with quiet competence. The military came when ordered and seems to have gone efficiently about its work. Communities from around the nation have welcomed refugees among them in homes and shelters; schools have generously taken in our students; gifts of money and offers of help abound. Despite the ways in which New Orleanians are different, perhaps because we are different, Americans seem to have a special fondness for the city and its people that goes beyond even the usual generous spirit of a generous people. Maybe it is recognition of the city's importance in the nation's history and economy. Maybe it is the memory that no one leaves a visit to New Orleans unchanged. Maybe it is that, in an age of abstracted materialism, the city's signal trait is human warmth.
IV
THE NEXT FEW MONTHS will be the time of decision for the city's future. Already the local spirit is eager to rebuild, and already there has been an outpouring of relief, but the serious decisions are yet to be made: whether New Orleans will be recognized as a strategic asset worth dramatically enhanced federal flood protection, and so whether the rebuilding will be sentimental or substantial. New Orleans will never be another Houston, but it can learn from Houston, and from many another city, even as it recovers a culture that is distinctively its own.
When God gave Satan permission to test Job's faithfulness, it was with one condition: "All that he has is in your power; only the man himself you must not touch." The inundation of New Orleans has tested America and, at least at the outset, exposed more than a couple of our failings. But it has not yet drowned our spirit, not the spirit of the people of the city nor the spirit of the country that has reached out to us as fellow Americans. The taming of the forces of nature has always been a challenge we have welcomed, not a task we have disdained or abandoned. And the fruits of peaceful order and free exchange, amidst commercial plenty shared with family and friends, have never seemed to us ignoble as an end. If this is so, then New Orleans has a place in America's future, not only in her past.
James R. Stoner Jr. is a professor of political science at Louisiana State University and author, most recently, of Common-Law Liberty (University Press of Kansas).